Group Forums >> Volunteer Firefighters >> Volunteer Staffing Levels
Volunteer Staffing Levels
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Posted 8 months ago Does anybody have data on recommended volunteer staffing levels per a given population? In other words, how many volunteers are recommended per 1000 people, etc.
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| Posted 8 months ago Nope. As long as the volunteers that we have is pretty active there are no regulation on ratio to population! |
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| Posted 8 months ago I would think the more the better! I guess it depends if it is truly volunteer or paid oncall. |
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| Posted 8 months ago I'm not sure volunteers/1000 population is the way to go. Any working house fire (regardless of town population) is going to take 24 - 36 people to fight successfully. You also need to consider whether you have people working in town during the day (your town and you mutual aid towns) who are allowed to come out. We have 5-6000 people and 33 sq miles. We are fire/rescue. Transport ambulance is separate and primary on EMS calls. We have 38 members including the chief, 2 DCs and 8 explorers. Some evenings we can staff 4 trucks. Yesterday at 7:30 am, we got one probie and an EMT for a possible heart attack. How do you count that against overall population?
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| Posted 8 months ago firedwg227 said: Acutally the more is really not better sometimes b/c you have too many ppl responding to calls and the dept dnt have the funds to provide all with radios and if they did it would be too much radio traffic during a dispatch to a call. |
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| Posted 8 months ago we dont have a ratio |
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| Posted 8 months ago I think that more is better but you do have a good point. If you don't have some organization then you wind up with chaos. We are located in a rural area and often we will have several people that live close to the station out on a call and those who live further away will stand by at the station in case we have another call or need more help. This prevents having more people on scene than necessary and it provides better coverage for our community. For the size of our community we have a lot of people on our department and a great response but we still have days when you wander if you will have a second person show up so you can roll a truck. Teach your volunteers to limit their radio traffic and set some guidelines for how many trucks to roll depending on the type of call. You can never have too many people standing by to help. When it rains it pours. |
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| Posted about 1 month ago ISO has staffing levels that counts for or against you on your ISO evaluation. When they say Firefighters they are talking about Career and 3 Volunteer Firefighters makes 1 Career Firefighter. So it takes 3 to make 1 Firefighter. They want 12 Firefighters (12 paid or 36 vol) per Engine Company. 9 for Service or Ladder Companies. A hint is assign people to stations and specific engines, ladders, service trucks and you will get better credit for staffing. If every volunteer has lights and sirens in there POV they will make the ratio 2/1 insted of the 3/1. Lets say if you have 30 firefighters including a chief. And everyone has documented lights and sirens and ppe in there POVs. The math would look like this.
Math without the documented Lights and sirens. 30 -1 chief = 29 divided by 3 = 9.66 By assigning 1 peson to the service truck it will get full staffing credit because ISO only staffs service trucks on paper and not by a body count on incident run reports. If you need any more info on this let me know and I will email it to you. David "Doorman" Bennett
"Real Men Climb the Ladder, Bitches Ride the Bucket." |